She spent her days wandering around the city, exploring its parks, alleyways, coffee shops and galleries; over cocktails in W. B. Yeats’s flat she debated the merits of Georgian poetry, and she visited the studios of artists including Jacob Epstein, Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, whose abstract, Egyptian-influenced work, with its emphasis on rough-hewn authenticity, Pound saw as sharing a sensibility with the modern poetry he was championing. She was taken to a suffrage meeting by Lilian Sauter, sister of the novelist John Galsworthy; she turned the thrilling experience into a short story, raw with anger at the injustice of women’s position. Enthralled by London’s possibilities, Hilda felt she had at last found somewhere she belonged, and tried to persuade Frances to stay on with her and share a flat in Bloomsbury. Already, the area represented to her exactly the life she wanted, one of open-mindedness and literary activity. But in October, Frances returned to America with her mother, and the following April, Hilda was stung by a letter announcing her engagement to a man named Louis Wilkinson. She was bewildered at this renunciation of the life they had devised together as modern women – eschewing marriage, embracing difference and creativity. But she refused to contemplate returning home herself. Like Virginia Woolf’s flight from Kensington to Bloomsbury, her departure from America for England had been a way of seeking ‘freedom of mind and spirit’ – the chance to establish a wholly new identity of her own. ‘I had to GET AWAY to make good,’ she later wrote to Bryher. ‘Can you see how London at least left me free?’ Her abiding sense of alienation would propel her poetry; separated from her strict parents by an ocean, her displacement gave her the courage to begin to work out who she was, or wanted to be.
H. D. would return to America only a handful of times in her life. In the bustle of London’s bohemian circles she found the stimulation that Philadelphia could not provide, and a sympathetic circle of friends whose support diluted Pound’s ongoing insistence that he knew what was best for her. ‘You’re a great success,’ Pound told her admiringly. With her short hair and elegant, waifish figure (to her teenage embarrassment – though to the benefit of the local basketball team – she was almost six feet tall), Hilda Doolittle cut a chic silhouette in the new fashion of flowing Greek-style gowns. Acquaintances were intrigued by her passion for ancient Greek (which she had taught herself), her musical voice with only the slightest transatlantic accent, and the look of ‘extreme vulnerability’ on her face. In her novel Asphodel (a sequel to HERmione), London fills the heroine with a new confidence, in her work and in herself: when her fiancé insists that she move out of ‘that infernal Bloomsbury’, Hermione staunchly refuses, associating her dingy bedsitter with her first intoxicating experience of freedom. But Hilda did not live alone for long: towards the end of 1911, her new friend Brigit Patmore introduced her at a party to Richard Aldington.
Then aged nineteen, Aldington was six years Hilda’s junior, a striking man whom the editor Harriet Monroe described, to his annoyance, as looking like a footballer. He had prematurely ended his English degree at University College London when his father’s money ran out. (He would later claim that he had been expelled for an unspecified rebellion.) Friends and family had entreated him to take a well-paid job in a City firm, but Aldington had instead found a position as assistant to a Fleet Street sports editor, which he considered a stopgap until he could establish himself in a purely literary career. By the time he met Hilda he had already published poems and translations in several journals, and was regularly skipping meals, spending his money on books instead.
Together, they gazed unhurriedly at friezes and manuscripts in the British Museum; since, being under twenty-one, Aldington was not allowed into the reading room, Hilda would copy out Greek poetry for them to translate together in cafes or at home. In the autumn of 1912, when the Doolittles arrived for a tour of Europe, Aldington joined the family in Italy. ‘R. & H. appear to be falling in love with each other somewhere en route from Napoli,’ wrote Pound in amusement, having met the party in Venice. They shared a deep love of antiquity, poetic aspirations and a rejection of middle-class values; what bonded them most powerfully was their mutual desire to forge a relationship free of hierarchy and convention. Hilda had been doubtful about the prospect of commitment, but Aldington seemed different from Pound: a marriage of true equals, she began to feel, would not supplant her own identity but rather enable her to live and write within a creative partnership which could itself be a way to freedom, each inspiring the other to greater work. On 18 October 1913 – at the same Kensington registry office which witnessed the weddings of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Nora and James Joyce, and Frieda and D. H. Lawrence – Hilda Doolittle and Richard Aldington were married. Their marriage certificate shows that he was twenty-one, she twenty-seven; while his occupation was given as ‘poet’, hers was left blank, struck through with a line.
For some time, Hilda, Aldington and Pound had been living respectively at 6, 8 and 10 Church Walk in Kensington. After their marriage, she and Aldington moved to 5 Holland Place Chambers, eager to establish a home of their own – but were somewhat perturbed when Pound immediately took a room across the hall, claiming he needed a place to fence with Yeats. In their flat, the Aldingtons worked side by side on their poetry, occasionally interrupted by Pound bursting in to borrow household items or recite a new verse. Soon, fed up with these intrusions, the pair moved to 7 Christchurch Place in Hampstead, and discovered that their relationship with Ezra improved when they could retain a distance from ‘Kensingtonian squabbles & intrigues’. For Hilda, this move was particularly significant. She was working hard to develop her own poetic style, writing spare, concentrated pieces imbued with dynamic force and a quiet intensity, often taking inspiration from Greek mythology or nature – the beauty of a stalk tangled in wet pebbles, the wind on the ocean. Her long 1912 poem ‘Hermes of the Ways’ opens at the borderline between land and sea:
The hard sand breaks,
and the grains of it
are clear as wine.
Far off over the leagues of it,
the wind,
playing on the wide shore,
piles little ridges,
and the great waves
break over it.
When she showed this poem to Pound that afternoon in the British Museum tea room, he was ecstatic. With a rallying cry of ‘Make it new!’, Pound was determined to lead a radical literary movement which would loosen poetry from Victorian and Georgian romanticism by a direct treatment of the subject, which centred on clear images and included ‘nothing that you couldn’t, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say’. In Hilda’s work, Pound saw the voice that could represent his ideal to the wider world. To that end, he sent three of her poems to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, an influential magazine with a reputation for placing newly discovered talent alongside established names. ‘Am sending you some modern stuff by an American,’ he wrote. ‘I say modern, for it is in the laconic speech of the Imagistes … Objective – no slither; direct – no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!’
In January 1913, Poetry printed ‘Hermes of the Ways’, ‘Epigram’ and ‘Orchard’ by ‘H. D. Imagiste’. The accompanying biographical note remained enigmatic: ‘H. D.,’ it read, is ‘an American lady resident abroad, whose identity is unknown to the editor.’ Seeing her poems in print under Pound’s label left Hilda with a surreal sense of invisibility, as if her work were not really hers; as if, deprived of her name, she might not even exist at all. Tellingly, she decided not to mention anything to Pound directly, but after the first publication she wrote privately to Monroe to ask her to remove ‘Imagiste’ from her name. Thereafter, her poems were signed simply ‘H. D.’.
Pound later claimed that he invented Imagism in order to launch the career of his ‘Dryad’, gathering around her a group of sympathetic poets, among them F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme and Ford Madox Hueff
er. Aldington would come to take a dimmer view: Imagism, according to him, was ‘simply advertising bull-dust’. The movement soon ran into trouble, as Pound’s ego began to override the group’s literary ambitions. In July 1913 Amy Lowell, an eccentric and aristocratic Bostonian poet with a huge car and a cigar habit, had arrived in London, eager to meet the Imagists. She was willing to expend energy and money on Imagism, and over candied fruit in her suite at the Berkeley Hotel, then on Piccadilly, she offered to fund the publication of a regular Imagist anthology, its contents selected collectively by the group. Pound, his sovereignty under threat, complained that Lowell was turning Imagism into ‘Amygism’, and switched his attentions to a new movement, Vorticism.
On 30 July 1914, Lowell arranged a dinner party at the Berkeley for the remaining Imagists, who appreciated her democratic and undogmatic approach. Later, in his memoirs, Aldington recalled that conversation turned to gossip about a writer recently returned to London after years in Europe, who had been invited to dinner but had not appeared: David Herbert Lawrence. Someone had heard that he was tubercular; in hushed tones, another conspiratorially informed H. D. – who had not yet met him – that he was a charlatan who had run away with a married baroness. His latest novel, someone else lamented, was sex-mad, and was sure to be suppressed. Seeking a moment’s peace, Aldington moved away to the window, from where he could make out a headline on a news-stand at the corner of the Ritz Hotel on Green Park: ‘Germany and Russia at War, Official’. As he watched, the proprietor unfolded a fresh poster and tacked it to the stand: ‘British Army Mobilised’. Aldington remembered glancing back into the room, ‘where friendly people were talking unhurriedly of civilised things’. At that point, Lawrence strode in, wearing evening dress. He had just been with his friend Edward Marsh, private secretary to Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Marsh had told him bad news: Britain was about to declare war on Germany.
*
On Tuesday, 4 August 1914, H. D. left the British Museum to join the expectant crowd gathered in front of Buckingham Palace. ‘We want war!’ shouted a member of the mob; another yelled back, ‘We don’t!’ At ten past eleven, a sombre King George V appeared on the balcony, steeled to offer reassurance to his subjects. A few minutes earlier, following a Privy Council meeting at the palace, Churchill had telegrammed the fleet with an order to commence hostilities against Germany. The golden age, as H. D. would later see it, was brutally ended; her new-found coterie was broken up. The directness the Imagists valued was undermined by a slippery public discourse of rumour and propaganda, while H. D.’s memories of happiness in Europe were obliterated by images of trenches and mud. The official mantra remained ‘business as usual’, but H. D. and Aldington could no longer find payment for their literary work; novels and poems were encouraged to take patriotic subjects, and journals disappeared or were incorporated into propaganda outlets. Many members of the Bloomsbury set tried the patience of the newly established conscientious objector tribunals, but most of the Imagists signed up willingly. Aldington went immediately with his friend Frank Stuart Flint to register as a volunteer, but was told contemptuously that a hernia operation he had undergone in 1910 would rule him out of the army. Leaving the building, he lost his way and ended up in the armoury, where a clerk promptly arrested him on suspicion of espionage.
London’s cityscape changed dramatically at the outbreak of war. The drawing rooms where H. D. had attended carefree parties were now given over to Red Cross units; posters declaring ‘Your Country Needs You’ were pasted on every street corner, and Bloomsbury square gardens became hospitals for wounded soldiers or grounds for the training of troops. After Zeppelin raids began in January 1915, ubiquitous blackout curtains masked any domestic activity from the outside, while signposts were removed and streetlights dulled. Young women stalked the pavements handing out white feathers to men not in uniform, and recruiting sergeants loitered in doorways to snare the vulnerable. H. D. felt estranged, as a woman and as an American, from the military gusto which seemed to override all her values, and when Woodrow Wilson was re-elected as president on a platform of keeping America out of war, she felt people begin to treat her with cool suspicion. Furthermore, she was worried about money. The war had affected the exchange rate, diminishing the £200 her parents sent annually from $5 per pound to $7, which reduced her to asking Amy Lowell for loans. And her anxiety was not only for herself: a couple of months after the war began, H. D. discovered she was pregnant. It felt odd to prepare for new life at a time of widespread death, but she and Aldington looked forward to becoming parents: the child seemed to represent hope for a future otherwise impossible to imagine.
But in the spring of 1915, H. D. suffered a loss that created ‘a sort of black hollow’ within her. On 21 May, the baby – a girl – was stillborn. H. D. was devastated. She considered the experience her own ‘near-death’; she would replay this trauma over and over in her fiction, associating her private grief with the public destruction sending thousands of soldiers to their graves. ‘Khaki killed it,’ says the heroine of her novel Asphodel, in which the child is delivered during an air raid ‘just like Daily Mail atrocities’, the ‘baby-killer’ Zeppelins flying overhead like a pack of hornets. H. D. was abruptly cast into the role of grieving mother, yet without the widely peddled comfort that her loss was a noble patriotic sacrifice. In the nursing home where H. D. spent three weeks, she sensed the ‘cold, nun-like’ nurses’ disapproval that Aldington, when he visited, was not in military uniform. The head nurse chastised her for taking up a bed which a soldier might need, as if deeming her feminine pain insignificant, silently scornful that she had not done her duty like the other new mothers who were diligently replacing the generation being killed in France. Friends visited bearing strawberries, irises, blue hydrangeas; H. D. thought none of them understood her suffering.
Far away from home and family, H. D. felt isolated as never before. She turned, for respite, to the ancient literature she loved, which now acquired fresh resonance: Greek epic and tragedy, with their heart-rending depictions of women wailing as their plumed husbands and sons strode off to fight a meaningless battle, suddenly felt contemporary. War propaganda often played on parallels with ancient battles in attempts to stoke feelings of heroism: from February 1915, the Gallipoli Campaign was fought on an area dubbed the Trojan Plain, while in March, HMS Agamemnon was among the British fleet sent to claim the Dardanelles from Turkey. Around this time, Pound and T. S. Eliot both worked on translations of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, which focuses on the homecoming hero, returning triumphant with the spoils of war only to be murdered in the bathtub by his unfaithful wife. But H. D. was drawn instead to Euripides, whose Trojan War plays reserve their deepest sympathy for the innocent mothers and daughters whose lives war destroys. During 1915, Gilbert Murray’s translation of Euripides’ Trojan Women – which focuses not on the Greeks but on the humanity of their enemy – became a brief sensation ten years after its publication; it toured across the United States, sponsored by the Woman’s Peace Party, and was praised by the Telegraph for bringing out ‘the affinity between the mind of Euripides and the mind of modern Europe’. In an unpublished early essay, H. D. praised the ‘psycho-physical intensity’ of Euripides’ choral odes, whose pared-down lyrics and vivid evocation of colour and landscape reflected her own poetic style. Euripides, she noted wryly, ‘was unpopular during his life as a free-thinker, and an iconoclast’. She admired his ambivalence to conflict, and what she read as his ‘outright anti-war and anti-social protest’: in his work, she found a moving counterpart to her grief.
That November, the avant-garde magazine the Egoist published H. D.’s translation of verses from Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, which tells the story of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter in exchange for a fair wind to hasten the Greek ships to Troy. Her choice to concentrate on passages from the female chorus, singers who comment on the action but are powerless to participate, seems to reflect her own feeling of helplessness, accen
tuated in these months by the rift gradually deepening between her and Aldington. Since May, her pain at the stillbirth had been heightened by her suspicion that Aldington, despite his protests, was indifferent to her suffering, had not really wanted the baby as she had. H. D. came to link the child’s death with her shock at hearing about the sinking of the Lusitania, which had been torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German submarine on 7 May 1915, killing nearly twelve hundred people. Aldington had broken the news to her in a way she had perceived as abrupt and insensitive; from that point on, H. D. had begun to associate her husband with the military impulse which had now brought death inside her own body. War, she wrote later, destroyed ‘the child Amor’: the stillbirth signalled the beginning of the end to three years of carefree happiness and mutual creativity.
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